“You can’t get from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happily ever after’ in five minutes,” Sagacia repeated. “You simply can’t tell a fairy tale at a story slam which has a five minute time limit.”

Simplia wasn’t buying it, so Sagacia tried again.

“First off, in a fairy tale, you’ve got to get the character out of the house and onto a journey, have him or her meet some magical friends (probably three of them, one at a time) and help them, have her or him encounter some obstacles or challenges, have him or her or them try to overcome an obstacle or three, have the magical friends each come to their rescue one at a time, and then they all have to get back home again or to the palace or somewhere and then be transformed somehow by the experience, like from a lonely child to a child with a loving home or from a mixed-up teenager to a happily married adult or from a struggling tradesman to a respected craftsman or from midlife crisis to stable or from some stage of life to the next stage. At least half of those things happen in any fairy tale worth it’s capital F and capital T. You can’t rush that.”

Simplia was stunned. It had been a while since she’d seen her friend on a rant. “‘Fairy tale’ doesn’t have a capital F or a capital T,” she said.

Sagacia was unphased by the orthographic observation. “If you’re supposed to tell a five-minute tale, you’ll just have to draw from a different genre!” she said in a final sort of way.

Turns out, it wasn’t final at all.

“In the end, fairy tales have to give people hope for their own lives,” she continued. “And they can’t do that unless we’ve spent sufficient time watching the protagonist suffer and persist through many challenges. The reward can’t come too easily. The hero has to prove he’s worth whatever the prize is. Or ‘she.’ These are not people with easy lives or simple tasks to do! You can’t just solve a little riddle and then live happily ever after! You have to stick with it and overcome a lot. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have to keep coming and coming and coming, and you must stay with it until you prevail!”

“If the challenges are easy, can you live happily for a little while?” Simplia asked.

“Well, yes,” Sagacia said. “I guess so, but, then it wouldn’t be a fairy tale, now would it?” she asked, crossing her arms as though that had settled it.

A long silence followed. Simplia sat at the table, restless, fumbling through the pile of mail, reading a bit here and there. At last, Sagacia sat down with her, and they both looked at the letters for Stymied in Sturbridge, passing them back and forth.

“Look at this!” Simplia said.

Sagacia looked across the table at a trio of letters lined up in front of her friend.

“What!” she demanded.

“It looks like other people are saying the same thing you are,” Simplia suggested. “See, they are suggesting folktales for a short time frame.”

Has he considered “The Hare and the Hedgehog”? One of the first tales I told and about five minutes long on a good day.

Sagacia cocked her head skeptically.

“Get it?” Simplia asked. “They are suggesting folktales for that short time frame. Not fairy tales, at all!”

“O-oh-h!” Sagacia said, letting the truth of it flow over her, welcoming its comfort. “O-oh! NOW I get it! Yes!”

“And, if you really want to stick to fairy tales, Csenge Zalka has a suggestion. Listen.”

Another idea would be to find a format that allows you to compress your favorite fairy tales into a shorter time frame. It is more a question of style and pacing than material, if you want to stick to fairy tales, I think. But I’ll keep an eye out for short ones :)

“And here’s her postscript:”

Or you can just tell it in rap :D.

“True,” Sagacia agreed. “If it’s a familiar Fairy Tale, you can shorten it or play with it in all kinds of ways and people will still love it!”

Simplia smiled proudly at having gained concensus.

“But I have another question,” Sagacia said, suddenly ponderous. “Remember when you asked if a simple tale could make you happy for a short time?”

“Yes,” Simplia said, wondering where all this was leading.

“Well, then,” Sagacia continued. “What are those short tales, and are they fairy tales? or something else entirely?”

“Like what? For example,” Simplia asked.

“Well, like ‘The Peddler’s Dream,’” Sagacia replied right away. “No magic, no enchantment, just coincidence. Right? But it makes you happy to hear it. And isn’t it told as a legend, with historical backup for whichever town it is set in? And is the peddler transformed? Has he grown into a new stage of life, happy, emotionally settled, prepared for whatever comes next? He and his wife did live on happily and he left the townspeople happier ever after, at least more prosperous. Does all that make it a fairy tale? Or something else?”

“Oh,” said Simplia, and after a long, pensive moment she added, “Well, that’s just too many questions for now! Let’s think about it. Better yet, let’s ask our magical friends!”

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About mary grace ketner

My lawyer tells me I should not put the words "Fairy Tale Lobbyist" on my business cards but rather "Representative" and "National Fairy Tale Association." But I'm not, and there isn't one. Even so, I don't think I'm going it alone.

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6 thoughts on ““You can’t get there from here!””

Aren’t we being a little rigid in terms of what denotes a “fairy tale”? Is there really a specific structure that it has to conform to? I’ve often found the term was much more flexible than some would think. After all, some are folk and some are literary. Some are long and some are short. Some star people, some star animals and a great majority of Andersen’s tales star inanimate objects. I suggested “The Hare and the Hedgehog” as a fairy tale because it came out of a book I own entitled “The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales”. Am I to assume that the true title of that book should be “The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Some Folk Tales and Maybe Some Other Stuff Too”? I run what I have in the past called a “fairy tale blog”. You’ll find that on that blog I often use a more liberal approach to the term (but I also categorize a bit). The reason being that people react to the term “fairy tale” a lot more strongly than they do terms like “folk tale” or even more general terms like “story”. Am I in the wrong?

Well, you are absolutely right about people reacting more strongly to the term “fairy tale” than to other story terms, Adam! And whatever “Marchen” means in German (Household Tales?), it is certainly more inclusive than Sagacia is, but she IS a Simpleton, after all! (Though, it must be said, she still falls short of Vladimir Propp.) And it was clearly rude of Simplia to openly and publicly discount responses left here in good faith! I will talk with them about this. (Hope I’m not setting myself up for failure; I’ve tried to reason with them in the past with mixed results.)

Nevertheless, I think there are times when examining groups of stories alongside their closest relatives to discover the family resemblances can be instructive, and one of the things that Fairy Tales–the ones that bear the surname in capital letters–have in common is that they are long! Some go on for generations.

I love your blog, by the way! I think of it as having a “Beyond Fairy Tales” approach. It is bright and young, perceptive and humorous; it delights the ear and eye with connections to today’s world. http://www.fairytalefandom.com/

I should have known better than to get flustered when dealing with simpletons. This happened the last time I talked to Jack too. :p

Honestly, as a storyteller, I’ve often found that form was less important than source or provenance. That’s how you know which stories can bear a little tweaking and which should be told as close to the original form as possible. So, the important terms for me were always “myth”, “folk tale”, “legend”, “fable” and “literary tale”. Only “fable” and maybe “myth” had an aspect of form to its importance. “Fairy tale” always seemed to be more of a marketing term by that point. Especially because so many people have their own ideas about what counts and what doesn’t.

I am pleased to say that in my blogging efforts, I do try to keep things from getting too jumbled through the use of my title cards (“Folk Tale Secret Stash”, “Fantasy Literature Rewind”, etc). At some point in the future I plan on adding another entitled “The Stuff of Legend” just so I can talk about characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood and Hua Mulan.

There are plenty of folk tales that fit within a 5-minute time frame, but I have to agree that most traditional fairy tales are longer, due to their structure. The only tellings I’ve heard that are shorter really require the the audience to be familiar with the story, which is then told in a sort of shorthand form.
So now of course the question has to be, is it POSSIBLE to tell a fairy tale, from scratch, in under five minutes. If we’re talking about full-bore hero quests with magical aid and various encounters, it seems difficult.

IT HAPPENS EVERY MONTH!

Someone in distress over a Fairy Tale theme or problem writes for help from Vasilisa the Wise via her syndicated newspaper column. But Vasilisa--well, she's stuck in a little hut on chicken feet until she finishes picking out the dirt from poppy seeds, or at the widow’s house in town, spinning flax into linen to make a shirt for the czar, or she’s at a banquet making swans come out of her sleeve. She just can't attend to questions right now, so she enlists the aid of her two simpleton friends who feed the cat and collect her mail. They can’t really help, either. Not by themselves.

Fortunately, they know others who can! Magical friends like you, who care about fairy tales and storytelling, who have accumulated experience, observations, and ponderings to share, and who might take a moment to post a response to help a correspondent solve a conundrum.

On the magical third day of each month, Vasilisa's mail magically appears, the Simpletons open it (with permission), read the question and ask for help answering it. Then they gather responses, yours and others', and distribute them every week or so to inspire further thought. As if by magic, when the third of the next month rolls in, so does another question! Here’s what the Simpletons hope you’ll do: Read the question then (a) post your response as a comment on the blog itself, (b) reply to it on the Storytell Listserv, or (c) write in your answer on The Fairy Tale Lobby Facebook page.

The Fairy Tale Lobby is a "Discussion Group" of the National Storytelling Network, and this blog is both the way we discuss fairy tale topics and a means of preserving your wisdom. Regardless of whether or not you are a member of NSN, if you value fairy tales, if you defend them in the real world, if you advocate their greater use, if you occasionally even lobby on their behalf, you will feel right at home here.

Your hosts at the Fairy Tale Lobby, besides Simplia and Sagacia who carry out all the communications, fluff the pillows on the Chesterfield, brew the tea, butter the gate, and bake the crumpets, are Megan Hicks and Mary Grace Ketner. They are the ones who enjoy and appreciate your ideas insights most of all.

This month’s question:

Dear Vasilisa the Wise --

Are you really as good as all that? Are you really wise? Or just cagey? When you're wearing your Czarina hat, are you genuinely concerned about the well-being of your subjects? Or do you just want to pacifying them enough that they don't foment unrest? In your stories, as an innocent, you're too good to be true. I'm pretty unschooled in fairy tales, so I wonder if there are many stories about you as an woman married to the Czar.

Usually the people at the top of the heap are there either as innocuous place holders or as the source of the conflict that winds the story up. Bad rulers are deposed in fairy tales. Do their usurpers then become the next wave of bad rulers?

Right now, I could use a story about a good monarch. A wise queen. A generous rich man. An honest advisor to the king. Not just a placeholder in the story. Not just a cameo role. I'm looking for a prime mover. Help me out here, would you? I'm growing

Cynical in Cynghordy

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